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    ‘Renegade Nell’ Review: When the Highwayman Is a Superwoman

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    In a new series for Disney+, the creator of “Happy Valley” and “Last Tango in Halifax” imagines a sometimes-superpowered 18th-century justice warrior.The British television writer Sally Wainwright may not be a household name in the United States, but for more than a decade she has been turning out television shows whose variety and consistently high quality few writer-producers can match.“Scott & Bailey,” which premiered in 2011, was a smart, tart buddy-detective procedural. The blended-families drama “Last Tango in Halifax” (2012) was finely tooled, irresistible hokum, reflecting the lessons Wainwright learned during her tenure on the venerable soap opera “Coronation Street.” She raised her game with “Happy Valley” (2014), a terrific series about the intertwined work and home lives of a doggedly heroic policewoman. And she segued into costume drama with “Gentleman Jack” (2019), a fact-based Victorian saga of lesbian romance and financial maneuvering that was, like the others, well made, well acted and highly engaging.The shows have a couple of through lines. They all take place in or near Wainwright’s home ground of Yorkshire, in northern England. And they all focus on tough, take-charge women — often women whose commitment to what they know or think is right can make them a little hard to live with.Wainwright’s latest show, “Renegade Nell,” whose eight episodes premiered Friday on Disney+, takes her down some new paths. The action moves south, toward London (it was filmed in Oxfordshire), and further back in time, to the early 1700s. And in a significant departure, Wainwright dabbles in the supernatural: Her heroine, the commoner Nell Jackson, can summon otherworldly strength and agility to battle the black magic wielded by her higher-born foes.Nell, played by Louisa Harland of “Derry Girls,” is another Wainwright heroine who must learn how to harness her strength and high spirits, and not do collateral damage to her family and friends. (She gets called “unnatural,” an epithet also applied to the protagonist of “Gentleman Jack” when she acts in ways women are not supposed to.) Nell’s challenge is greater, though, because the strength is so unexpected. Stumbling upon a stagecoach robbery, she is about to be shot when a tiny light appears and gives her ruffian-bashing, bullet-dodging capabilities.The light turns out to be a winged humanoid named Billy, played by Nick Mohammed of “Ted Lasso,” who returns to bail out Nell whenever she is in danger (though not always as promptly as she would like). And she is in danger a lot: Her new powers, combined with some complicated and tragic circumstances, turn her into a fugitive suspected of multiple murders and eventually put her in the unlikely position of saving the British crown from a Jacobite invasion. (Thematically, it’s helpful for Wainwright that the actual monarch at the time, who faced an actual coup attempt, was a woman, Queen Anne, played in the show with an arch sang-froid by Jodhi May.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘A Strange Loop’ Nominated for 11 Tonys as Broadway Lauds Comeback

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      “The Lehman Trilogy,” as well as revivals of “Company” and “For Colored Girls,” led in their respective categories as the industry tries to recover from the long pandemic shutdown.A musical about making art and a play about making money dominated the Tony Awards nominations Monday, as Broadway sought to celebrate its best work and revive its fortunes after the lengthy and damaging coronavirus shutdown.The race for best musical — traditionally the most financially beneficial prize — turned into an unexpectedly broad six-way contest because the nominators were so closely divided they had to expand the number of nominees.Out of the gate, the front-runner is “A Strange Loop,” a meta-musical in which a composer who is Black and gay battles demons and doubts while trying to write a show. Even before arriving on Broadway, the show, written by Michael R. Jackson, had won the Pulitzer Prize in drama after an Off Broadway production at Playwrights Horizons; it opened on Broadway late last month to some of the strongest reviews for any new musical this season, and on Monday it picked up 11 Tony nominations, the most for any show.“I feel really grateful, and I feel validated for putting in all the years and all the hours,” Jackson said after learning the news. “It feels amazing to know better things are possible.”“MJ,” a jukebox musical about Michael Jackson, was nominated for 10 Tonys. Myles Frost, center, was nominated for best actor in a musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesScoring the most nominations is not always predictive of winning the prize, and “A Strange Loop,” which is adventurous in form and content, will face tough competition from “MJ,” a biographical jukebox musical about Michael Jackson; “Six,” a fan favorite about the wives of Henry VIII; “Girl From the North Country,” which combines the songs of Bob Dylan with a fictional story about a boardinghouse in the Minnesota city where Dylan was born; “Mr. Saturday Night,” about a washed-up comedian hungering for a comeback; and “Paradise Square,” about a turning point in race relations in 19th-century New York.Both “Paradise Square,” which picked up 10 nominations, and “Girl From the North Country,” with seven, have struggled at the box office, and will now hope that their multiple Tony nominations will help reverse their financial fortunes. For “MJ,” its 10 nods are a form of vindication after several influential reviewers criticized the show for sidestepping sexual abuse allegations against the pop star.“The Lehman Trilogy,” which arrived on Broadway with an enormous — albeit pandemic-delayed — head of steam following rapturously reviewed productions in London and Off Broadway, picked up eight nominations to dominate the best play category. The play, which follows the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers, was written by Stefano Massini and Ben Power, and featured a dazzling production centered on a rotating glass box designed by Es Devlin. All three of its leads — Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester — were nominated for best actor.“The Lehman Trilogy” was nominated for 8 Tonys, including best play. All three of its leads — from left, Adam Godley, Simon Russell Beale and Adrian Lester — were nominated for best actor in a play.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The Lehman Trilogy” vies with four other dramas for best play. Among them are two dark comedies — “Clyde’s,” by Lynn Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer winner who was also nominated for writing the book for “MJ,” and “Hangmen,” by Martin McDonagh, an acclaimed British-Irish playwright who has now been nominated five times but has yet to win. The other contenders are “Skeleton Crew,” Dominique Morisseau’s play about factory workers at an automotive plant facing shutdown, and “The Minutes,” Tracy Letts’s look at the unsettling secrets of a small-town governing body.The Tony Awards, which honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway, are an annual celebration for American theater, but they are particularly important now as a potential marketing tool for an industry that is still grossing less, and selling fewer tickets, than it was before the pandemic forced theaters to close for a year and a half. The awards are presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing.“This Tony Awards will mean so much more than honoring the performances and the artistic work that’s been done this season — it’s also celebrating the resilience of the community, and that this much work is being done and being seen,” said Rob McClure, an actor who scored a Tony nomination (his second) for his comedic and chameleonic performance in the title role of “Mrs. Doubtfire.”Billy Crystal was nominated for best actor in a musical for his performance in “Mr. Saturday Night,” based on his 1992 film. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWell known performers scoring nominations included Uzo Aduba, Billy Crystal, Rachel Dratch, Hugh Jackman, Ruth Negga, Mary-Louise Parker, Patti LuPone, Phylicia Rashad and Sam Rockwell. But several other big stars now working on Broadway were overlooked by nominators, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Laurence Fishburne and Daniel Craig, as well as Beanie Feldstein, starring in “Funny Girl” but unable to escape the long shadow of Barbra Streisand.This season saw an unusually large number of works by Black writers, and that created more opportunity for Black performers, directors, and designers, some of whom were nominated for Tonys. Among them are two performers new to Broadway, Jaquel Spivey, the star of “A Strange Loop,” and Myles Frost, the star of “MJ,” now facing off against Crystal, Jackman and McClure in the leading actor in a musical category.“Black playwrights have had an amazing presence this season, and I hope that continues,” said Camille A. Brown, who scored two nominations Monday, for directing and choreographing the revival of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf.” Reflecting on her own show, she said, “Having seven Black women on a Broadway stage has a lot of meaning, and speaks to the importance of sisterhood and love and Black women holding space for one another.”“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf” was nominated for seven Tonys, including for best revival of a play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe seven Tony nominations for “For Colored Girls” are a bittersweet triumph for a production that has been languishing at the box office and had already announced an early closing date. The revival picked up more nominations than any other show in the race for best play revival, a strong category in which many eligible shows won positive reviews.It will now face off against four others: “American Buffalo,” David Mamet’s drama about a trio of scheming junk-shop denizens and “Take Me Out,” Richard Greenberg’s look at homophobia in baseball, as well as two plays that had never previously made it to Broadway despite being considered important parts of the playwriting canon, “Trouble in Mind,” Alice Childress’s look at racism in theater; and “How I Learned to Drive,” Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer-winning drama about child sexual abuse.The competition for best musical revival is small, but strong. There were four eligible shows, and only three scored nods: “Company,” “Caroline, or Change,” and “The Music Man.” Excluded was the revival of “Funny Girl” which fared poorly with critics, but has been doing fine at the box office.“Company,” the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical, was nominated for 9 Tony awards, including best revival of a musical. Patti LuPone, a nominee at left, performed with Katrina Lenk. Matthew Murphy/O & M Co./DKC, via Associated PressThe nine nods for “Company” pack an especially emotional punch because its composer and lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, died soon after attending the first post-shutdown preview. “The longer he’s not with us, the more I miss him,” said LuPone, who picked up her eighth Tony nomination — she’s won twice — for her work in the production.The nominations were chosen by a group of 29 people, most of whom work in the theater industry but are not financially connected to any of the eligible productions, who saw all eligible shows and voted last Friday. There were 34 eligible shows, 29 of which scored nominations; the five left out were all new plays.Up next: a group of 650 voters, including producers and performers and many others with an interest in the nominated productions, have until June 10 to vote for their favorites, and the winners will be announced at a ceremony on June 12. The ceremony, at Radio City Music Hall, is to be hosted by Ariana DeBose; the first hour will be streamed on Paramount+, followed by three hours broadcast by CBS.Broadway’s grosses are down in part because tourism remains down in New York City, and in part because of ongoing concerns about the coronavirus. Many of the nominees interviewed Monday said they hoped the spotlight of the Tony Awards would lure more patrons back to Broadway.“Anyone that’s doing theater right now has been hit really hard by the pandemic,” said Marianne Elliott, a two-time Tony-winning director who scored another nomination for “Company.” “It’s gratifying to see that Broadway is coming back. To have the Tony nominations for all of these shows is just a celebration of what we do, and it’s lovely to be here.” More

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      in Theater

      Review: In ‘The Lehman Trilogy,’ a Vivid Tale of Profit and Pain

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      The play, tracing the rise and fall of the fabled financiers, finally opens on Broadway after successful runs in London and at the Park Avenue Armory.Much of what happens in “The Lehman Trilogy” is invisible to the eye, which is not the way prestige drama usually works onstage.Directed by Sam Mendes, this British import, which reaches across 164 years of American history to trace the family saga behind the fallen financial powerhouse Lehman Brothers, was a scalding-hot ticket during a brief prepandemic run at the Park Avenue Armory. Yet it offers almost nothing in the way of spectacle, and only the slightest of costume changes: a top hat here, a pair of glasses there.In the captivating production that opened on Thursday night at the Nederlander Theater, it relies largely on an unspoken agreement between actors and audience — to imagine together, and let fancy crowd out fact.Sort of the way that heedless investors looked right past all warning signs in the faith-based run-up to the stock market crash of 2008. Illusion is illusion, after all, and financial markets, like the theater, require a certain suspension of disbelief — though when the fantasy bursts in theater, the fallout is less ruinous. When investors halted their collective game of make-believe 13 years ago, mammoth financial firms like Lehman Brothers met their swift demise, and the world’s markets suffered the aftershocks.“The Lehman Trilogy,” though, is not actually a number-crunching play; reports that Jeff Bezos took in a recent performance should not cause you to infer otherwise.Written by Stefano Massini and adapted by Ben Power, it is a vividly human tale, nimbly performed by three of the finest actors around: Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester, who, in making his Broadway debut, has replaced the original cast’s Ben Miles. (I did not catch Beale, Godley and Miles at the Armory; it was too scarce a ticket, and too pricey.)Slipping in and out of myriad roles, the actors spend the bulk of their time narrating, standing outside their characters. We, in turn, spend most of our time envisioning the fleet-footed story they conjure with words over three-plus hours (including two intermissions) that feel nowhere near that long.Our eyes track these witchy actors as they move through Es Devlin’s revolving glass-and-metal office set, while our minds persuade us that the story is unfolding in a succession of disparate spaces that resemble it not at all.A peculiarly gentle interrogation of the American dream’s descent into many-tentacled nightmare, “The Lehman Trilogy” begins as so many stories of this nation do: with an intrepid immigrant’s arrival. A young man from Bavaria stands before us, suitcase in hand, freshly landed in New York Harbor and certain he is worldly after 45 days at sea.From left, Godley, Beale and Lester in the play. Their feats of storytelling are the primary reason to see “The Lehman Trilogy,” our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe year is 1844, he is Heyum Lehmann, and in a moment we will see him reborn as Henry Lehman — his Ellis Island moniker bestowed by a port official too obtuse to comprehend the newcomer’s real name.On first impression, Henry (Beale) is darling, funny and utterly sympathetic. When his younger brothers, Emanuel (Lester) and Mayer (Godley), follow him across the ocean, we feel a similar warmth toward them.This is where the mechanics of the play, with these deft and lovely actors breathing such life into the brothers, coax us into an ease at odds with moral logic as we watch their genteelly brutal acquisition and stockpiling of wealth.The brothers settle in antebellum Alabama, where even the earliest iteration of the family firm, a shop selling fabrics and clothing, relies on a local economy built on slavery. As the Lehmans grow more ambitious, they start buying and selling cotton from the plantations, making their first fortune on it.Seldom do we hear a voice of conscience — like the local physician who tells a dispirited Mayer, in the aftermath of the Civil War, that the collapse of the South’s economy should not have come as a surprise.“Everything that was built here was built on a crime,” the doctor says. “The roots run so deep you cannot see them, but the ground beneath our feet is poisoned. It had to end this way.”That is, of course, a warning that the pattern of reckless profit and resulting pain will repeat: in the 1929 crash, which Lehman Brothers managed to survive by morphing yet again, and in the 2008 crash, which it didn’t. It is also a signal that the founders of the firm — whose deaths, when they come, are meant to move us, and do — were not the ethical betters of their more vulgar descendants.With a subdued, filmic score by Nick Powell, played live by Candida Caldicot on an upright piano, “The Lehman Trilogy” is structured in three parts. It follows Emanuel and Mayer to New York, and their family through successive generations, whose principals we first meet in childhood.So here is Emanuel’s son Philip (Beale), a future shark, as a gape-mouthed tot prodded to parade his smarts for guests. Here is Philip’s son Bobby (Godley) as a buoyant 10-year-old, whose father mercilessly dismantles the boy’s love for horses as creatures rather than commodities.And most enchantingly, here is Mayer’s son Herbert (Lester), a future governor and senator, as a thumb-sucking 3-year-old playing with his father’s beard, and later as a fair-minded 9-year-old at Hebrew school, objecting to the divine massacre of the innocent children of Egypt.No matter how horrid some of the Lehmans become (not Herbert, though; never Herbert), knowing them young cushions our feelings toward them later. That’s human nature. What’s unsettling is which people in this saga of capitalism we see portrayed, which people the play helps us to imagine clearly and which people we are asked to imagine vaguely or not at all. Proximity shapes our sympathies.“The Lehman Trilogy” exists because of the cascading financial disaster that extinguished Lehman Brothers in 2008, yet its perspective is very much from the top of that deluge. Any harm bucketing down below is at best an abstraction, just as it is in 1929, when the play shows us suicides of despairing stockbrokers but none of the pain radiating through lower social strata. And slavery, the founder of the family’s feast, is kept in soft focus, off to the side.The primary reason to see “The Lehman Trilogy,” then, is to witness the superb Beale, Godley and Lester in their feats of storytelling — and to conspire with them in imagining the play’s tarnished, if not truly vanished, world.When intermission comes and the auditorium lights turn on, gaze up at that glass set. You’ll see an awfully comfortable-looking audience reflected there.The Lehman TrilogyThrough Jan. 2 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; thelehmantrilogy.com. Running time: 3 hours 15 minutes. More

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      in Television

      Adrian Lester Finally Arrives on Broadway, via Wall Street

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      A few years ago, Adrian Lester saw “The Lehman Trilogy” in London. Not only did he love it, but he was also impressed on a purely technical level. He knew how demanding it was for just three actors to portray several different characters and to carry the intricately devised epic, which follows the rise of the Lehman brothers in the 19th century, then the fall of their company in the 2008 financial crisis.“I was happy to watch it, be amazed, and walk away and go ‘phew,’” the British actor said in a recent conversation. “I thought to myself, ‘How are you doing that?’”Now he really knows, because he’s currently testing his endurance on Broadway as one of those three actors.The National Theater’s production of Stefano Massini’s play, adapted by Ben Power and directed by Sam Mendes, premiered in 2018, and had a short run at New York’s Park Avenue Armory the next year. The cast — Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles — reunited once again for a Broadway transfer in March 2020, but the pandemic put an end to it after a handful of previews.Undeterred, “The Lehman Trilogy” is back at the Nederlander Theater, with Lester stepping in for Miles (who left to play Thomas Cromwell in a stage version of Hilary Mantel’s “The Mirror and the Light”). Opening night is scheduled for Oct. 14.Small adjustments have been made to the script, Mendes said, to address the criticism that it had glossed over the Lehmans profiting from slave labor. “We wanted to acknowledge the family’s history in dealing with the slave owners of Alabama, when the three founding brothers first arrived from Germany,” Mendes said in an email.Lester with Adam Godley in “The Lehman Trilogy” at the Nederlander Theater, where it is scheduled to open Oct. 14.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere is no editorializing, however. “We don’t cross that line of going, ‘Hey audience, this is horrible,’” Lester, 53, said. “We simply present it and allow them to make their judgment. I suppose my casting makes that process easier.”He added, “We’ve been very aware of what’s being said in the text, what we may have missed, what things need to be pulled out or put in.”With all due respect to Miles, the casting switcheroo is a special treat for New Yorkers, who have not seen Lester nearly enough over the course of his three-decade career on the stage and screen. It feels incredible that he is just now making his Broadway debut, though he has popped up on smaller local stages: as Rosalind in Cheek by Jowl’s “As You Like It” back in 1991 and 1994, as that moody Scandi prince in a Peter Brook production of “Hamlet” that transferred from London in 2001, or as the real-life 19th-century actor Ira Aldridge in “Red Velvet” (written by Lolita Chakrabarti, Lester’s wife).No matter how good those productions were, they did not turn him into a New York marquee name. Lester good-naturedly pointed out that when he is recognized here, it’s usually because of a pair of screen performances that go back 20 or so years: as a movie star dating Tracee Ellis Ross’s character in the TV series “Girlfriends” and as a presidential-campaign operative in the Mike Nichols film “Primary Colors.”It’s another story back home, where the Birmingham-born commander of the Order of the British Empire has had lauded turns as Henry V and Othello, and received an Olivier Award in 1996 for his performance as Bobby in “Company,” also directed by Mendes — because, yes, Lester can sing and dance, too.He has also done the requisite television work, spending, for example, seven seasons on the comic caper “Hustle” as Mickey Rocks, the charming leader of a merry band of con artists.That show’s creator, Tony Jordan, was looking for someone along the lines of George Clooney in “Ocean’s Eleven” to play Mickey. Those are tough designer shoes to fill, but Lester’s ability to embody nonchalant, beguiling poise turned out to a perfect fit for a smooth criminal.“Before creating the show I’d read 20 books on confidence tricks,” Jordan wrote in an email. “I should be the hardest person to con, but I know that if Adrian’s Mickey had tried to sell me shares in a recently discovered gold mine in Arizona, I’d have invested heavily.”For Lester, the part was catnip because it actually was many parts. “The reason why I stayed with this character is that every episode, he pretends to be someone else,” he said. “You knew who he was inside, but you watched him become something else in front of you. And that,” he said, snapping his fingers for emphasis, “was just gold dust for me. I loved it.”But beyond Mickey’s parade of disguises and tricks, Lester also grounded him.“Adrian brought a truth to the role,” Jordan said. “You believed him totally, and more importantly, he made you feel that he wasn’t on the screen, that he was sitting beside you. That he was your best friend.”Sitting in an impersonal conference room in between “Lehman” rehearsals, Lester was thoughtful and soft-spoken — he was barely audible above the HVAC system’s white noise. The immediate result was I leaned forward and focused. This magnetic pull translates to the stage as a mysterious kind of spell: Nicholas Hytner, who directed Lester in “Othello” and “Henry V,” wrote in an email that the actor “always seems to be nursing a secret. It’s what draws you in.”“In this industry, you’re not going to get promoted by just waiting for someone to promote you,” Lester said, “you have to promote yourself.”Kendall Bessent for The New York TimesPartly, it’s that Lester, who trained at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, has impeccable chops. But he also knows not to overuse them, which would transfer the attention from the character to the actor. “When I was in rehearsal in drama school, I would speak things in meter and then never do it again,” he said. “If you’re in front of an audience and your voice, your mannerism, your pattern of speech, your intellectual approach to the performance tells the audience that you’re acting, they will switch off. And so I’ve never wanted to do that in anything.”​​For Hytner, this translates into a great classical actor. “He is in total command of the way Shakespeare’s people think and speak,” Hytner said, “in long, perfectly weighted paragraphs that emerge as if spontaneous.”Onstage, Lester has an uncanny way to establish a connection with both his scene partners and the audience by expressing a lot with seemingly little. His Othello, for example, exuded a sense of natural authority without resorting to the usual manly signifiers of military toughness. This made the times when he upped the ante all the more impactful — the scene in which he kills Desdemona was even harder to watch than usual. (The production can be streamed on the National Theater’s website.)Lester’s creative ambitions are naturally leading him to try to wrest more autonomy in his career. He has been dabbling with directing — an episode of “Hustle” here, a couple of episodes of “Riviera” there — and he’s now preparing to step behind the camera for his first feature, with possibly a second one in the works as well.“If you want to be a part of creating these stories onstage, on television, on the film screen, it’s always a struggle,” he said. “If you want to have more of a say on how the story goes, you have to step behind the camera. In this industry, you’re not going to get promoted by just waiting for someone to promote you,” he continued, “you have to promote yourself. And the only way you do that is by saying no to the things you would have said yes to beforehand, and wait for the next thing to come. The only power you have as an actor is to say no.”In his case, it has also been to say yes to roles where his mere casting defied antiquated expectations of who can play what.“Every time I’ve played a role — every time — I’ve been hit by the same response of ‘Oh goodness, that’s interesting,’” he said, pointedly making exceptions for “Six Degrees of Separation” and “Red Velvet,” in which he portrayed Black men. “Every time I’ve played a character, a classical one especially, it’s been somewhat a departure from how people perceive that role to have been.”He paused, smiled. “I have to politely leave those people to their own thoughts.” More